Music-Pass

9 March 2006

Apple have just launched a new pricing model for the iTunes Video Store – Multi-Pass – which allows you to pay an up front fee and get new episodes downloaded automatically to your iTunes when they’re available. It’s a really great model to use for episodic TV shows, which is what it’s being used for at the moment, and trumps other subscription based services as you get to keep the content after your multi-pass runs out.

In fact, in many ways, it turns an episodic TV show into something akin to a music album, except you get it broadcasted to you as each piece is finished instead of waiting till everything is complete.

So why not extend this model to music?

Pay up front the same price as a full length album, get the latest track immediately and then receive a new track every week until you’ve got, say, 10 tracks and your multi-pass runs out. Obviously the details could be changed around a bit, so you get a track every two weeks or whatever, but I think this could be a really powerful new model – half way between traditional singles and albums.

Each track of course doesn’t need to be an obvious single – you could mix in live tracks, b-sides, rarities and maybe even interviews, really turning around the way we think about traditional albums. It would also allow the traditional promotion of certain tracks (like singles), which could be pushed out to people on the day the traditional CD single gets released. Another option would be to turn it all around, and make it about the label, not the artist, and have tracks by different artists sent out every week.

Even if this model for music distribution doesn’t take off, I’m sure we’re now seeing the beginning of the end for traditional albums and singles – they just don’t make sense in the digital music world.

From: Articles

9 March 2006